Calls for a boycott of Iran’s parliamentary elections
As Iran prepares for Friday’s parliamentary elections, calls to boycott the vote are turning into a test of legitimacy for the ruling clerics amid widespread discontent and anger toward the government.
A separate election on Friday will also decide membership in an obscure, 88-member spiritual organization called the Assembly of Experts, which selects and advises the country’s supreme leader, who has the final say on all major state affairs. Although the assembly normally operates behind the scenes, it has the all-important task of choosing a successor to the current 84-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has ruled Iran for more than three decades.
Iran’s leaders view election turnout as a projection of their strength and power. But a robust vote seems unlikely with these elections taking place amid a slew of domestic challenges and a regional war stemming from Israel’s invasion of Gaza and including Iran’s network of proxy militias.
Analysts say Iranians have also lost confidence in the elections after repeatedly voting for reform-minded lawmakers and presidents who promised changes in foreign and economic policies and more individual rights that mostly failed to materialize.
A government poll cited last week by Khabaronline, an Iranian news outlet, predicted a turnout of about 36 percent nationally and only about 15 percent in Tehran. (The site said it withdrew the report on government orders.) By comparison, in 2017, more than 70 percent of Iran’s 56 million eligible voters cast their votes for reformist President Hassan Rouhani.
Mr Khamenei on Wednesday urged Iranians to vote even if they are unhappy with the status quo, stressing that voting amounts to protecting the country’s national security.
“If the enemy sees a weakness in the Iranians in terms of national power, he will threaten national security from various angles,” Mr. Khamenei said in a speech broadcast on state television. “There are no benefits to not voting.”
But opponents disagree. Many prominent politicians, activists and imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi have called on Iranians to boycott the vote to demonstrate that they no longer believe change is possible through the ballot box.
“The Islamic Republic deserves national sanctions and global condemnation,” Ms. Mohammadi saida statement from her cell posted on social media. She added that sitting out elections “is not only a political necessity, but also a moral obligation.”
A group of 300 prominent activists and politicians, including former lawmakers and a former mayor of Tehran, signed a joint statement calling the election a farce due to the strict screening of candidates that predetermined the outcome of the election. The government was “rigging the elections to confront the will of the people,” the statement said, adding that the signatories refused to participate in the “staged event.”
The main source of Iranians’ anger toward the government has been the violent crackdown on demonstrations led by women and girls in 2022 and 2019, which left hundreds of protesters dead, including teenagers and children, and the imprisonment of dissidents, students and activists.
That added fuel to long-standing grievances over government corruption and economic mismanagement that, along with foreign, nuclear and military policies, have hampered efforts to lift economic sanctions, damaging Iranians’ prospects for a decent income be clouded.
Analysts say voter turnout will be an important measure of the government’s popularity and, by extension, its power.
“The elections are important for two reasons,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. “First, we are returning to popular protest by not participating in elections, and second, how low the vote will be could tell us something about the Islamic Republic’s power base.”
But even with low turnout, the Conservative group is expected to maintain its hold on Parliament as its candidates are largely unchallenged. An appointed body called the Guardian Council, which vets all parliamentary candidates, has eliminated almost all those who could be considered independent, centrist or reformist. More than 15,000 candidates were approved for 290 seats, including five places for religious minorities, for a four-year term starting in May.
The Reform Front, a coalition of parties that generally support greater social freedoms and engagement with the West, announced that it would not participate in the elections because all its candidates had been rejected. disqualified and that it could not support any of the council’s approved candidates.
“Right now we have no room to maneuver and we have no choice,” Reform Front spokesman Javad Emam said in an interview. “The relationship between the people and the state and politicians has been seriously and deeply damaged.”
In Tehran, election posters and banners put up by authorities across the city this week equated voting with nationalism and love for Iran – but not for the Islamic Republic. “High participation = a strong Iran” and “Decide for Iran,” read two of the banners seen in photos and videos in the Iranian news media.
Campaign rallies in Tehran lacked the typical enthusiasm of previous elections. In many places, candidates gave speeches to small crowds surrounded by rows of empty chairs, according to videos on social media and witnesses. Outside the University of Tehran campus, election campaigners set up a microphone this week and invited passersby to speak freely, but these were met with dismissive shrugs and angry swearing, a witness reported.
Many Iranians dismissed the entire exercise as a waste of time. “It doesn’t matter who comes and who goes and who takes power – I have absolutely no hope of fixing this system, nor do I know a way to reform it through the existing constitution,” said Alireza, a 46-year-old screenwriter in Tehran who asked that his surname not be published for fear of retaliation.
Vahid Ashtari, a prominent conservative who has exposed financial corruption and nepotism among senior Iranian officials and faced prosecution, labels elections as “sarekari,” a Persian slang term for deceiving or deceiving someone. He said this in a statement on the social media platform that outside the campaign bubble “people live their lives” and don’t care which candidate is running under which coalition.
Campaign events seemed to attract larger audiences in some smaller cities, where politics are more local and politicians are known through their clans. In Yasuj, a small city in southwestern Iran, videos on social media showed a conservative candidate participating in an impromptu dance party and energetically rallying the crowd of men and women – a clear bending of the rules that prohibit public dancing.
Some government supporters said their decision to vote was an act of defiance against the naysayers and traditional enemies of Iran, Israel and the United States.
“I am going to vote and invite everyone around me to vote too,” Rasoul Souri, 42, who works at a government agency in Tehran, said in a telephone interview. “If we participate in the elections, our country’s development will disappoint our enemies.”
Analysts say Iran is making efforts to avoid war amid current tensions in the region are linked to domestic dynamics. Mr. Khamenei, they said, does not want to risk external confrontations that could destabilize Iran at home at a politically sensitive moment, especially when the issue of his succession, and in the absence of the future of the Islamic Republic, is being quietly discussed.
The election to the Assembly of Experts could have consequences given its role in appointing the next supreme leader. But a vetting process that disqualified a former reformist president, Hassan Rouhani, from the search The re-election to a seat he has held for more than two decades indicated to analysts that Khamenei’s successor will be a conservative.
“Given the high stakes, there will be no room for error for Iran’s ruling elite,” said Nader Hashemi, professor of Middle East politics at Georgetown University. “Organizing these elections to ensure a loyal assembly will be a top national security priority for the Islamic Republic.”
Leily Nikounazar provided reporting from Belgium.